→ January 22, 2024
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Babel.

R.F. Kuang won the most recent Nebula Award for Best Novel with her first novel for adults, Babel, a long and intense fantasy story that upends many of the conventions of the ‘youth goes to magic school’ subgenre while also attacking serious questions of colonialism and privilege. It’s dark and riveting, and perhaps its best feature is how unsentimental it is about its subject and characters.

The book’s full title is the unwieldy Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, which I think makes the book sound boring when it’s actually a thriller for the majority of its 500-odd pages. Set in the 1830s, it follows a Chinese orphan who is adopted by a strange English academic and brought to Oxford to study at its translation school, which is the most powerful institution in the country and perhaps the world. In this alternate history, translators can create powerful objects from silver by taking advantage of the meaning gaps between words in different languages that might have the same denotations but that have cultural or other contextual differences not captured by a word-four-word translation. These silver bars power much of the world at the time, but Oxford is their only producer, making England the world’s most powerful nation and allowing them to dictate the terms of trade with their partners … and to leave much of the non-European world in a state of underdevelopment because they refuse to share the technology. The orphan, who takes the English name Robin Swift, finds himself torn between the comfortable world of his academic setting and his own values, including his ties to China, which drive him to fight the ivory tower and try to bring silver-making to the broader world.

Kuang begins her novel with a familiar trope – the orphan is plucked from poverty by a mysterious (white) person who brings them to a school that reveals hitherto unknown talents and opens up a world of power and possibility to them. Robin is fluent in Mandarin and becomes so in English, while his professor-benefactor, who takes him in as a ward until he’s old enough for Oxford’s Linguistics Department, drills him in other languages to better prepare him for academe. Once there, Robin becomes fast friends with a few classmates and acclimates quickly to a life of privilege and sudden respect, as the linguistics tower is the jewel in the Oxonian crown, and those ticketed for its top floors – where the silver-making is done – are the Big Linguists On Campus. (I’m not making that other joke, sorry.) The plot begins to diverge from the archetype shortly after Robin matriculates, as an outsider attempts to recruit him to a shadowy, decentralized activist group that wants to pilfer silver bars from Oxford to share them with the developing world. Robin doesn’t choose his fate immediately, although he ultimately chooses – or is forced to – side with the rebels, opening up the second portion of the book, where Kuang continues to explore the same themes of exploitation and social justice, but shifts the style from Magic School Wunderkind to a spy thriller with tons of action and many, many surprising twists.

As a straight read, Babel is a smart and clever thrill ride up to the very last page. The gimmick around languages, using what gets lost in translation as the proxy for magic, is incredibly clever and a credit to Kuang’s intellect and her own linguistic prowess; it feels like the sort of idea you’d have if you’re fluent in several languages without much or any relationship and have tried to translate something but found the words lacking. That alone won’t power a book, but Robin is a superb protagonist, principled but cautious, anxious yet willing to make bold decisions, flawed but ultimately heroic in his own way. His friends are fun side characters, perhaps not as fleshed out as they could be other than the Indian-born Ramy, but this book is already long and giving any of them more time would probably just pad the length.  

This particular subgenre has many smart and entertaining books in it, but I can’t think of an other example that is this serious at its core. At heart, Babel is an angry book, based loosely on the leadup to the Opium Wars and the English crown’s exploitation of both its colonial empire and of China after it subjugated the latter by use of superior weaponry. It’s also a metaphor for the two centuries since then, where the West has seen enormous economic advancement, leading to longer life expectancies and better health outcomes, that it has not shared with the developing world. Some Asian countries – the so-called “Tigers” – have caught up, but did so by selling to the west and undercutting labor costs, while a few western financiers played God with their currencies and nearly killed their economies in the process. The same imperialist-capitalist philosophy that leads fictional England to keep silver-making to itself drives nations and drug manufacturers to charge market rents for treatments or cures for diseases that are devastating sub-Saharan Africa. Over 90% of the children with HIV and over 90% of the pregnant women with HIV in the world live in that region. People with HIV make up over 2% of the population of Africa as a whole. The virus is driving a co-epidemic with tuberculosis. The developed world has not stepped up with sufficient funds to stem the spread of the virus and reduce the death rate through antiretroviral drugs. Even ignoring the potential economic benefits of helping a continent with over a billion people fight an epidemic, isn’t there a moral imperative to help people not die of a disease that is 1) mostly preventable and 2) mostly treatable, just because they don’t have the money or even a way to get it?

Robin’s answer, ultimately, is yes. How he gets there, and what he and his friends end up doing to try to topple the tower, literally and figuratively, makes Babel one of the smartest and most thought-provoking page-turners I’ve read in years. I can even see why readers who’d read this first might have been disappointed by her next novel, Yellowface, which feels insubstantial by comparison. Its ideas are also important, but Babel creates a universe to call out universal ills, and forces you to reckon with its themes by plunging you into a story you won’t want to put down.

Next up: Currently reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

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→ April 12, 2021
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The Oracle Year.

I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long.

Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.

The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are also a lot of people here who completely lose sight of their own humanity in trying to figure out who the Oracle is or what he’s doing or how to profit from his predictions, including, I’d argue, Hamza, even though much of what he plans as Will’s “business partner” turns out to be prudent. And then there’s Leigh Shore, the frustrated gossip reporter who latches on to the Oracle as a story and ends up (unsurprisingly) directly involved in the plot, a character who has one dimension, her ambition to get the story that will make her career, but it’s a good dimension for a character who ends up proving somewhat critical to the resolution of the story.

Where the plot goes is both extremely clever, reminiscent of good time-travel fiction like that of Connie Willis, and a little bit too easy. Soule has a very strong grasp of a storyline that could easily spin out of control, and brings back earlier elements to help close the story in a way that feels tightly plotted. He also has Dando and some of the other characters talk their way out of trouble that might not play out quite so easily in the real world – it’s not completely implausible, but at the least, Soule rushes through some of the dialogue where Dando (or someone else) argues a point and his antagonist concedes too quickly despite having the upper hand. It’s a small complaint for a novel that so engrossed me that I had to slow myself down to make sure I wasn’t skipping whole sentences, but I definitely got a sense near the end that I knew how this was all going to work out, and that it probably wouldn’t be wholly satisfying. But man did this thing hum along in a way few novels do, and Soule is obviously quite intelligent and tech-savvy enough to make some of the ways in which Hamza and Dando protect the Oracle’s identity credible.

Next up: Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

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→ December 16, 2020
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Ghostwritten.

After reading Utopia Avenue this summer, I realized, with some help from readers, that I was missing out on quite a bit of the context because I hadn’t read enough of David Mitchell’s previous work. His first novel, Ghostwritten, introduces several people who’ll pop up again in his later books, while also introducing what I assume is the first appearance of one of his noncorporeal Horologists.

Ghostwritten is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones – sometimes just by the detail of a character appearing in the background of one and becoming the protagonist of the next, sometimes more significantly. That made it feel much more like a tuneup for Cloud Atlas, where he weaves six separate novellas together but is more effective at making them all feel like parts of the same tome. That’s not to say Ghostwritten doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.

That story where we meet what I assume is a Horologist is probably the book’s best-written and most interesting, as the narrator is a spirit who can take over a person’s brain and can jump to another person with a touch. The spirit is in Mongolia, and ends up in someone who’s on the run from the secret police, so the whole chapter has a spy-story vibe that isn’t present elsewhere – the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas read like a detective story within the larger novel.

One other oddly compelling story in the book is set on a tea shack on Mount Emei, one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism, in a tale that spans almost the entire life of its main character. Beginning when the shack owner is just a young girl, the narrative follows her through regime changes, social upheaval, and multiple razings of the shack that require her to rebuild. There’s a powerful undercurrent of perseverance and acceptance, consistent with the tenets of that religion, demonstrated by her resilience in the face of what could have become crippling defeats.

The first and the penultimate stories in Ghostwritten revolve around a doomsday cult that launches a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very much like the actual 1995 attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo that killed 12 people, which was chronicled by one of Mitchell’s stated influences, Haruki Murakami. While the events, and ultimate confusion over what’s real in the depiction, make a useful framing device for the other stories within the novel, the translation of a real-world terrorist attack in such stark terms felt almost exploitative, especially given the extent of Mitchell’s imagination on display elsewhere in the book.

Perhaps reading Ghostwritten out of order, after reading what is widely considered his best book (Cloud Atlas) and two more written after that one (Slade House and Utopia Avenue), takes away some of its power, as I was left with the impression that I’d read a strong debut that hinted at better things to come but also felt uneven and in some ways unfinished. The concluding two chapters are especially unsatisfying, one because it’s an unsuccessful attempt at an experimental style, the second because it blows up (pun semi-intended) most of what came before. Had I read this first, I probably would have compared it to the rookie season of a player I thought would become a star but hadn’t shown it all in year one – say, George Springer in 2014. Now I’m biased because I know Mitchell can do so much better, and already has.

Next up: I just finished David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail, and am almost halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

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→ August 28, 2020
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The City We Became.

N.K. Jemisin became the first author ever to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel when all three parts of her Broken Earth trilogy took home the honor; she also became the first black woman to win that award at all, which is hard to believe in a field that brought us Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, but the Hugos have had their issues with gender and especially race.

The City We Became is Jemisin’s first novel since the last book of the previous trilogy came out in 2017 (although she has written some short stories and a lauded novella called “Emergency Skin” in the interim). This new novel, which marks the beginning of a new trilogy or series, feels like a complete departure in tone and style from the Broken Earth novels, trading the dark, forbidding atmosphere of her future earth devastated by climate change and tectonic shifts for a modern New York City that’s full of life and humor, and also extradimensional superbeings.

Cities in this new novel can come to life, and express that through individual people – usually just one person for a city but, because New York is the Greatest City in the World, it gets one person per borough. When a person becomes a city, they gain powers related to that city’s identity and characteristics, or in this case the borough’s characteristics. Each borough of New York City has different demographics, and a different reputation, and Jemisin infuses the book with all of that, not least with the way Staten Island is a borough apart from the rest, and the quiet enmity that exists between it and the rest of the City.

As the novel opens, however, there’s another enemy that requires the immediate attention of the various City-humans, who also include Saõ Paolo and later Hong Kong. Something is invading New York City from an alternate dimension, although it appears to be coming up from below the ground, and it’s causing real damage even though only a few people – the City-humans and, for reasons never explained here, a few people with them – can see its physical form. The five boroughs are all ‘born’ simultaneously across the city, and have to find each other so they can team up, assuming they can work together, and try to fight their new, common enemy. She is, as you might guess, no pushover, and she comes with some serious attitude.

If the often funereal tone of the Broken Earth trilogy was an obstacle for you, you might find The City We Became a much easier go, because this book is madcap. If Zadie Smith wrote a speculative fiction novel, it would probably look a lot like this. Some of the humor is specific to New York, and maybe not everyone will enjoy Jemisin’s digs at Staten Island as much as I did, but plenty of it is situational and often laugh-out-loud funny.

That’s possible because Jemisin has put so much time and effort into creating these five main characters, giving them diverse identities, back stories, and personalities, so that each of them feels fully realized and their interactions with each other come across as natural conversations. So much of what’s funny in this book is organic, and even though the humor is entirely beside the rather serious points Jemisin is making, it also allows the seriousness to play better on the page.

And there is a lot going on under the surface, too. This is a novel of man’s impact on the environment, but it’s not anti-urban or anti-development; it’s a love letter to cities, to the life and culture they bring, and to the way they bring people together despite differences. The enemy’s tactics may make her rather unsympathetic, but, like Killmonger, she also makes some good points. When you learn why she’s so adamant about destroying New York – that the birth of a city here has dire consequences where she exists – and consider the parallels to real life, that there’s no such thing as unfettered growth without consequences, you can at least see her point, and why she might be able to convince one of the boroughs to listen to her.

Jemisin has clearly set up a larger story arc here beyond what happens in this one novel, although this story does have a concrete ending that’s more complete than those of the first two Broken Earth books. There are multiple unresolved questions, even some minor details (like what happened to Brooklyn’s townhouses), that point to a sequel. But there are also more characters in here to whom you might relate on some level, and the fact that these novels are written in the present day and in a very contemporary voice put me more into this story than I ever was in the previous trilogy, making this the best Jemisin work I’ve read to date.

Next up: Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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→ April 28, 2020
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The Double.

Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s novel The Double seldom appears on the list of his most notable works, even though it was adapted into a movie by Dennis Villeneuve (retitled Enemy) starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the two title roles – two, because the story revolves around a man who discovers that there’s another man, an obscure actor who has minor roles in various films, who is a carbon copy of himself. The two men are completely indistinguishable, not identical twins, but identical in every way, down to scars and blemishes, leading the first character into an existential crisis, one where he tracks down his double and causes a spiral of problems for both of them and for the people closest to them.

Tertuliano, whose name roughly translates as “chatty” (or something more pejorative), is the first man, a history teacher whose colleague suggests that he rent a particular movie without explaining up front what the significance of the film might be. It turns out that a minor character actor in the film is a dead ringer for Tertuliano, a similarity that affects the teacher far more than you might expect at first. He tries to find the actor’s name, renting any movie he can find from the same production company, and eventually uses a subterfuge to contact the actor. Even their voices are identical – the actor’s wife thinks it’s her husband on the phone, not Tertuliano, playing a prank on her – and when the two men meet, there’s an immediate, mutual disdain as you might see when two cats meet each other for the first time and each decides that it’s his territory and the other is an intruder. As with cats, this leads to a sort of pissing contest where each man tries to demonstrate some sort of dominance over the other, as if to say that he’s the real person and the other the facsimile, with consequences that are both shocking and foreseeable, with a clever little twist in the novel’s very last paragraph.

Saramago expresses the existential crisis that Tertuliano undergoes rather well throughout the book, keeping the character’s anxiety and dread visible but at a slow boil, so his actions and gestures aren’t overly dramatic or forced. Once you accept the premise that he’s undone by this thought that he has a clone in the world, and loses some sense of himself in the process, everything that follows makes sense. It’s his clone who seems harder to buy, especially when he bullies Tertuliano into accepting something extraordinary, an action that ultimately leads to the novel’s climax and resolution – although the payoff does mostly justify the torturous path that got us there.

The bigger question around The Double is how well Saramago communicates the reasons for the existential crisis – that is, why Tertuliano goes off the rails just because he saw his duplicate in a movie. It might be unnerving to see someone who looks just like you in a film, but would you stalk that person and try to meet up with them? Would you let this unravel your entire life? Probably not, unless your life was already a bit threadbare, but Saramago doesn’t give us any real reason to believe that Tertuliano was already in that kind of state – he’s not a happy man or very fulfilled by work or his relationship with his girlfriend, yet he doesn’t come across as a man on the verge before he sets off on his quixotic effort to find his double.

You’re also not going to get any explanation of how the clones came about, either, so don’t go into The Double expecting one: the resolution is about the characters, not the mystery of their existence. I was hoping for some kind of answer, but Saramago never actually implies that he’s going to provide one, and the book heads in a different direction from the start; it’s hard to see a way where he could have given that explanation and still taken the story where it goes. It doesn’t live up to Blindness, one of his best-known and best-regarded novels, which pulls off the trick of a compelling (if often gross) story that conveys a stronger philosophical message, but is at least thought-provoking with a plot that works right up through its resolution.

Next up: I’m a few write-ups behind but am currently reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

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→ November 11, 2015
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Mona Lisa Overdrive.

My buyers’ guide to the outfielder market is up for Insiders. Also, I’ll have my annual boardgame rankings post up later this week, but as a preview, my #1 game is still Carcassonne and it’s on sale now for $22.59 on amazon.

William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy began with the seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, which was the first book to win the trifecta of sci-fi awards (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick); the book kickstarted the cyberpunk movement, foresaw all manner of cultural shifts that would come about due to the wiring of the world, and may have even helped shape some of the Internet’s early development. I read it in 2005, and it still stands out as a unique work of speculative fiction, one that is overwhelmingly intelligent without ever becoming inaccessible, with a bleak yet expansive vision of a future that isn’t quite dystopian but is certainly light on flowers and rainbows.

I read the sequel, Count Zero, around this time last year, and it didn’t move the needle much for me, as the tripartite storytelling technique felt disjointed, and it was never quite clear why I cared about any of what was going on. The conclusion of the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, ties the Count Zero plot together with threads from Neuromancer (bringing back Molly, one of that book’s two protagonists), in a highly ambitious storyline that was engrossing but never gets the coherent ending that Gibson probably had in mind.

The narrative of MLO starts from scratch, as we are dropped into four subplots that, as in the preceding book, will all come together by the conclusion, including a not-quite-dead hacker on a stretcher who is comatose and permanently jacked in to the “matrix” and the simstim (a sort of cyberspace reality TV show) star Angela Mitchell whom we met in Count Zero. Someone is after these two people, for reasons that even at the end of the book aren’t exactly clear, leading to a sort of creeping chase throughout the novel where, at first, the targets aren’t even aware anyone’s after them, and various other characters are “used” without their knowledge as part of the hunt.

Gibson’s brilliance in Neuromancer was in his foresight, seeing the potential gains and dangers of the then-nascent technology and concocting a fictional environment that built a culture around the tech – being connected, or interconnected, will change us all in substantial ways, from how we work to how we interact with each other. (It already has, in the First and Third Worlds, albeit in differing ways.) He became a cyberpunk prophet for the depth and incisiveness of his vision; he didn’t just talk about hacking, but about what hacking and hackers might be like. It’s not hard science fiction where we get lengthy explanations of how stuff works; Gibson takes that as a given, which can make his prose a bit confusing at times due to his neologisms and colloquial dialogue, but also has the effect of putting the reader more directly in the story while allowing him to focus on character and emotion.

However, Mona Lisa Overdrive‘s climax falls quite a bit short of his lofty goals. Gibson began to touch on the topic of digital immortality, of uploading one’s “personality” into the matrix to continue to function after the death of the body, but it becomes a mere plot device here, with no exploration of any of the myriad questions around the possibility. The reasons for the conspiracy to kidnap Angela Mitchell or the hunt for the comatose man are still ambiguous after the conclusion, while the actual denouement seems deliberately open-ended and rather unsatisfying. I read Gibson for his vision, but I think here he didn’t offer enough of it.

Next up: Peter Taylor’s 1987 Pulitzer-winning novel A Summons to Memphis.

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→ October 23, 2015
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

My first AFL dispatch for Insiders covers Jurickson Profar, Alex Reyes, Ian Clarkin, and more.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is Philip K. Dick at his paranoid, mind-bending best, the kind of fiction he was doing long before it became somewhat mainstream with films like Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to play with layers of reality and imagination. There’s a mystical component here that also presages the outright religious overtones of his later work (notably V.A.L.I.S.), but with a more questioning and slightly cynical note to it, along with an absolutely bleak view of the near future of our species.

In the novel, PKD gives us an Earth so ravaged by environmental destruction that it is too hot for anyone to go outside unless they’re in one of the resort towns of Antarctica, while overpopulation has led the UN to undertake forcible migration via a draft lottery to various colonies scattered throughout the solar system, all of which involve living in underground “hovels” with only occasional glimpses of the surface. There’s also been interstellar travel to the (fictional) planet Prox, presumably around Proxima Centauri, from which the industrialist Palmer Eldritch has returned after a ten-year voyage, crash-landing on Pluto with a suspicious, unknown bit of cargo with him.

The colonists are all hooked on a drug called Can-D (say it out loud) that allows them to engage in a sort of group hallucination where they can inhabit, almost Being John Malkovich-style, two fictional characters, Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walter, whose environments within the hallucinations are determined by what layouts and miniatures the colonists have purchased. To put it another way, you buy the dolls, the dollhouse, the doll furniture and doll cars and doll whatevers, and then you chew the drug that lets you be the dolls. It’s big business, including the folks who sell the goods that get “minned” to be sold to colonists for their layouts.

Eldritch has brought back a new drug, called Chew-Z, that requires no layouts and is even more potent in the dream-states it provides to the users – but with an apparent cost in lost liberty, although exactly how that works isn’t revealed until later in the novel. But suddenly the users no longer control their hallucinations, and who exactly is controlling them and what the nature of that being is become the critical questions for the protagonists of the novel, none of whom is exactly operating with clean hands.

PKD touches on three of his most frequent and successful themes in The Three Stigmata: perception, paranoia, and mortality. What’s real is never clear in the book; we get layers of unreality, characters emerging from altered states unsure whether they’ve left the alteration or merely entered new ones, and the aforementioned questions of control of their perceptions. That plays into PKD’s paranoid themes, which also appear in the book’s greater structure – Earth in a sort of environmental ruin, the UN exercising a tyrannical hold on the world’s population, a free (or sort-of-free) market that enslaves its workers through their materialistic demands. As for the theme of our mortality, saying too much would spoil the book’s conclusion, but this book presages the exploration of the same theme in Ubik and also hints at the mystical conversion he underwent after what he believed to be a religious experience in the early 1970s.

PKD avoids the taut ending the reader might demand but that the story obviates – you can’t tie all of this up cleanly because the story is, by design, so messy. But it also fits the difficulty of addressing all of the metaphysical questions he asks in this book and in most of his works, about the nature of reality as we perceive it, about how much we cede our privacy and liberty to governing bodies, and of course about life and death and whether there is something beyond the latter. The Three Stigmata asks this sort of uncomfortable, unanswerable questions, just as PKD does in most of his best works.

Next up: Another Hugo winner, Robert Sawyer’s Hominids.

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→ February 10, 2015
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The Diamond Age.

Neal Stephenson won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996 for his novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a postcyberpunk bildungsroman that can’t survive under the weight of its own self-importance. While Stephenson managed to create a credible Gibsonian universe in his earlier hit, Snow Crash, here his worldbuilding detracts from the story about the titular book that might be able to reprogram the future of humanity, and his hifalutin language doesn’t meld well with the story’s focus on a child protagonist.

The “primer” of the book’s title is a “ractive” book (short for “interactive” … I’m not a fan of this kind of conlang/argot shit, which ends up little more than an annoying distraction), designed by the engineer John Hackworth for Lord Gussie Fink-Nottle (close enough) using nanotechnology and I think what we’d now call a 3-D printer, designed to raise a young girl – the Lord’s granddaughter, and, via a pirated copy, Hackworth’s daughter – to be a hypereducated, worldly, creative young adult. The copy intended for Fiona Hackworth ends up in the hands of an impoverished, abused girl named Nell, brought to her by her scapegrace brother, Harv, setting in motion a great and possibly unintended sociological experiment pitting nature against nurture – not a mother’s nurture, but a surrogate in the form of the actress, Miranda, who performs nearly all of the “ractive” functions in the Primer for Nell.

The Primer itself is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure hepped up on nanotech; in fact, Stephenson’s whole universe here revolves around nanotechnology, where static objects can be built in Matter Compilers, and nanosites – microscopic entities designed to perform specific functions in the air or within someone’s body – abound, including security infrastructures that must have the NSA seething with envy. (The book’s very title was coined by cryptography pioneer and nanotechnology researcher Ralph Merkle, whose great-uncle made a certain boner with which you, being a visitor to this particular blog, are likely familiar.) Stephenson’s vision of an age of nanotechnology, combined with a dark post-nationalistic viewpoint where communities are organized in “phyles” that called to mind the guilds of early RPGs, is so overly and unnecessarily complex that it overwhelmed the core storyline of Nell’s education and maturation through her experiences with the Primer. The “Drummers” hive-mind phyle is one of the novel’s bigger messes, ambiguously-described yet central to the operation of the Primers and, ultimately, to the resolution of the plot.

My other, secondary problem with The Diamond Age was the absurd vocabulary Stephenson used in it – perhaps a nod to its underpinnings in Victorian literature, but coming off as stilted and sometimes inappropriate to the characters in question. Nell is only about eleven or twelve years old when she has this thought:

It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

Now, maybe all of you knew the word “anfractuous” from childhood, but I only encountered it sometime in the last two years, somewhere in The Recognitions or Gravity’s Rainbow or some classic from the 1800s that routinely sent me to the dictionary. It’s a valid English word, actually a pretty useful one, but you’re never going to hear that or “ramifications” in the internal monologue of a preteen. Stephenson’s either showing off or incapable of capturing the vernacular of someone that age – and the whole book is full of maddening word choices like these.

The shame of this incoherence is that Stephenson buried what might have been a remarkable novel of ideas, one that merely uses the platform of his nanotech universe to explore the roles of community, government, family, education, and religion in a world where we’re that much closer to the singularity. Even one of those topics would make the foundation for a good novel, although I can’t blame Stephenson – who’s not afraid to be prolix in his prose – for aiming high. Unfortunately, the resolution of the story is so muddled, both in plot and in philosophy, that by the end of the book it wasn’t even clear how we’d gotten there, much less whether there was a point to any of this.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m tackling Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and it is indeed an excruciating read.

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